on the roads that connect us, the grief of what cannot be replaced and the enduring light of los angeles

start on Sunset. then take Temescal to the PCH north which will turn into the 10 east then merge left onto the 110 near downtown and take that to the 210 exit Lake

It seemed both impossible and poetic that David Lynch died amidst the fever dream of Los Angeles wildfire while we were all still reeling and in shock.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the artist who connected us to each other and our greater consciousness by way of boulevards and LA landscapes climbed up the fire escape as soon as the blue sky returned. Not blue as in velvet. But blue as in true. Blue as in honest. Blue as in hopeful and also hazardous to our health. Blue as in blessing and curse. Blue as in between two worlds.

There is no better way to explain both the specificity of our local communities and the threads that connect us with each other — than with roads. Freeways. An ecosystem of movement and pause, speeding tickets and may as well just turn off my engine since we don’t seem to be going anywhere.

You are either the kind of person who fucks with the immense dichotomies that exist in the shade of sun-drenched streets or you’re not. For me, glamour means nothing without its gutters. Sunsets without smog.

There is a lawlessness to LA that exists in the creativity of both the people and the weather. The traffic. The relationships. Imagined worlds. We are a soup of people thrown together like ingredients without a recipe and our neighborhoods reflect the different flavors — our restaurants, and rec centers and homes. The old 20s Spanish and the Craftsman’s, of course. The midcentury apartment buildings. The narrow beach homes. Painted Trailers. Mansions made of glass.

LA will either make you cynical or fearless but either way, it will teach you how to build a resumé solely off of life experience because, here, that is your currency. No one takes themselves seriously enough to ask you if you have an MFA or went to college. People think it’s cool when you tell them that you got your start writing for a mass paperback series before dabbling in adult website copywriting which payed your rent while pregnant with the boyfriend you met through a friend while they were both PAing on a set for a music video.

No one gives a shit about the oxford fucking comma. Didn’t go to college? Who cares. If elitism does exist here it’s in the separation of DOERS and SAYERS. Namedroppers and the effortlessly secure.

When you grow up in LA or live here long enough to feel like it, you remove yourself from the worship of celebrity and instead put characters on a pedestal. Angelyne. Hollywood Jesus (RIP.) Dennis Woodruff (RIP). The guy who drives around chain-smoking in the truck covered in coins. (Saw him yesterday on Wilshire!) Characters who are playing themselves.

No one goes up to Beyonce at her daughter’s dance class and asks for an autograph. That’s tourist shit. People are people here. And while hierarchies exist, there is nowhere in the world less starstruck. Instead, we worship the brave, the loud, the naked. We are lap dances and outdoor music venues and face tattoos. The dude who hikes Fryman Canyon with the boombox.

***

I have been watching David Lynch videos nonstop since he died because there are few people who know how to validate humanity — in all its lit-up darkness — with such tenderness. That is, in my opinion, what defines true artistry. And also, the Los Angeles I know.

And in the countless interviews I have watched these last few days, I have been able to properly grieve for Los Angeles.

Because, yes. Exactly this.

EXACTLY THIS.

There is no light like the light in LA which is perhaps why it became the world’s stage. Why all of the old homes boast giant windows. Why the convertible is the state flower and everyone is beautiful here.

***

There’s that line in Clueless that says everywhere in LA takes twenty minutes and maybe that used to be true but now it takes 45 to two hours depending on traffic. Over an hour to get from The Palisades to Altadena for sure. But it has always been during my longest commutes that I familiarize myself with the city. And I have learned over the years, not only to tolerate but to love the journey between east and west sides.

People talk a lot of shit about LA traffic — we are as notorious for our slow-moving freeways as we are the clichés that sell Kardashian shaped ass. When people think of LA they think of people who can afford to lose houses in a fire and jobs to writer’s strikes but the majority of people I know here are struggling creatives with children enrolled in public school. People who love Los Angeles as much as they love making art that is becoming harder and harder to sell.

We live in million-dollar homes and live paycheck to paycheck. Because that is what creative life in a city with inflated real estate looks like — even for people like me, single mothers on MEDI-CAL.

The dichotomies of Los Angeles are what I love most about her. The extremes cohabitating. The glamour and the filth. The honest conversations about the things that people fake.

Los Angeles taught me how to suck the marrow from the bones of life because that is what people come here to do. It is the land of optimists. An evacuation zone for the world. People fleeing places they cannot live freely or love freely or breathe.

We are a city of angels made of scrap-metal, producers and PAs and people who know how to collaborate under distress. Which explains the past two weeks of swift action and community service.

When art and organizers collide, a new world is possible and we have seen that with our own eyes these past two weeks. Fuck our so-called leaders. We are here to save each other with art and food and the same brains that build worlds out of an idea someone had in the shower.

***

Los Angeles is still peripherally on fire, although it’s far enough away now so that we can sleep. I stopped checking WATCH DUTY days ago. We are all starting to remember that we have jobs and our kids have orthodontist appointments. I am so behind on everything right now and feel so estranged from my own insight I find myself stopping mid-sentence whenever I try to formulate a thought.

I am reminded of those early days of Covid. When we didn’t know if we would make it (ie survive) or ever have toilet paper to wipe our asses with again. I am also reminded of those early days after my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. When I felt as removed from my life as I felt buried under it. Connected to every feeling and also numb. Zooming in on everything until it blurred. Where am I again? What day is today? Did that just happen?

It all felt as frightening as it was absurd. How fast things change without warning. How we wake up with people who exist only to fall asleep without them. And places. And things. There is an overwhelming vulnerability that comes with the realization that ALL COULD BE LOST at any time. I have lived with this since Hal’s death and it has both destroyed whatever semblance of safety I feel in the world and also enabled me a kind of freedom and acceptance that has livened me.

The night when everything was burning, I thought LA might disappear. That is what it felt like even though I didn’t say it out loud. Told my kids to pack a bag just in case.

I was blown away by how calm they were. How calm we all were. Seasoned professionals now. The fact that tragedy hardens us isn’t a bad thing. So long as we also stay soft where it matters. That is the kind of resilience I mean.

Our house is in the flats — where La Brea meets Wilshire, in a neighborhood called The Miracle Mile. There is tar where I live, bubbling from the streets and everyone in my neighborhood is stained with it — our cars splattered with what appears to be black ink.

And I love it here. Living in an inkwell. The persistent tar that no one can control. A reminder that nature will beats us all at arm wrestling.

***

All week, friends have been passing around the passage from Slouching Toward Bethlehem where Didion she talks about the Santa Ana winds — winds that control the nervous system of our city but also Southern California as a whole.

‘The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”

I have lived my whole life in Southern California under their threat. My first known trauma the Harmony Grove fire that changed the landscape of my hometown when we were forced to evacuate for two days in 1996. I was fifteen years old.

I wasn’t able to take anything from my home and I was inconsolable thinking I had lost my beloved journals. My whole life was in those pages, is how it felt as soon as I feared they were gone. That was the day I realized I was a writer.

If you have ever had to evacuate your home before you will know what I mean when I say that, in an instant, you recognize what matters to you and THE ONLY thing that mattered to me were my words.

I thought of them Wednesday night when the Sunset fire began to burn. Where are they, I wondered. Somewhere in this house.

***

“I don’t know what to say” is what everyone keeps saying. Specifically those of us whose homes were spared.

There is tremendous guilt that comes with feeling relieved the nightmare is over because we know that for so many, it is not.

And not knowing what to do with that feeling of privilege — of having a home when so many people we know don’t — is yet another unifier.

There are those bonded by one level of trauma and the rest of us bonded in our collective guilt for being spared.

Here, take my clothes. Take my shoes. Oh, you don’t want them. Right, of course you don’t. What can I do? What can I do…

It is humanity at its best but also it’s most desperate.

No one deserved to lose their homes.

But many thousands here did.

And it isn’t fair.

And now what.

And fuck.

***

Last Wednesday, everyone was evacuating from places they had already evacuated to. People were packing bags and then packing them again.

People were scream-texting each other to GET OUT. COME HERE. ARE YOU OKAY.

It felt like there was nowhere to go.

Like we were all we had.

And in a way, that’s still how it feels.

***

Before I moved to LA, this was a place assumed but never realized. A two hour drive from my hometown, we often visited but only to the places common among visiting tourists. Sunset Blvd. Rodeo Drive. Venice beach. I collected souvenirs from the shops that sold them, clutching plastic Oscar statues in the back of my parents’ minivan as we merged from La Cienega to the 405 south, developed photos of me posing with Charlie Chaplin and the Hollywood sign.

My first apartment overlooked the airport and when I couldn’t sleep I’d chain smoke on my balcony and watch for airplane lights. I commuted to my office in the Palisades every morning. From Lincoln Blvd to PCH to Temescal Canyon to Sunset to Via De La Paz.

In those days, I was consumed by a love for my literary heroes and regularly had lunch in my car in front of Henry Miller’s home on Ocampo. I don’t know if it burned in the fires but I assume it did along with almost every house of every person I know who lived there.

I thought of the office on La Paz and Miller’s home and the parades we watched from our friend’s yard while watching the news. That was before we knew the Palisades was completely gone. “It looks like someone dropped a bomb,” is how my son described it from the window of the airplane.

I became obsessed with the LA writers as all newly hatched Angeleno’s seem to be. Didion of course, but also John Fante, Brett Easton Ellis, Babitz, Bukowski. It was their portrayal of the grit here that made me fall in love. Not just with their work but with each neighborhood I inhabited. The yellow-carpeted studio off Selma Blvd. The duplex off Melrose. The exposed brick of the one bedroom off 6th street.

I fell in love a hundred times in this city and have kept every souvenir from every phase in my life. I have always been a collector and everything in my home tells a story of the person I was and still am. The family we were and still are. Every piece of art on my walls was made or gifted by someone I know and love or did at one time. Everything is mismatched — a collage of souvenirs, furniture donated by friends when we couldn’t afford to buy. My father’s childhood dresser and curtains my mother hand-sewed for my twins’ nursery. The maternity shirt I married my husband in and the caftan I wore when I delivered his eulogy.

Everyone in Los Angeles has a story like mine. A house full of reminders of who they were and are and want to be when they grow up. Journals they would take in their arms if they had time to flee homes they knew would burn.

And so many have lost these things. Tens of thousands of our friends and neighbors, former lovers, future ghosts.

And I grieve with them and for a place that has never not felt, to me, like the most generous place to become. Homes, places, not just to sleep and live but to build worlds. Take an idea and pin it to the wall. Schools, of course, the same. And restaurants. Two chairs at a table where strangers became more. Old theaters and the broken legs of generations of curtain calls. Drivers and passengers on the roads that have always — and will continue to — connect us from east to west, north to south, zigzagging over the soul of a city that will rebuild in spite of its winds and its fires and its strikes and its pandemics and its rush hour traffic jams home.

And maybe we’ll never be the same. (Of course we won’t. No one is after a death.) But what love story doesn’t have its dark night of the soul.

And what city named for its angels, will not endure in the afterlife.

(Happy Birthday, David Lynch.)

Through the darkness of future past/ The magician longs to see./ One chants out between two worlds/ Fire walk with me.